How JK Rowling Ruined Her Own Franchise
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- Опубліковано 15 чер 2024
- This video essay gives an overview/recap of the fantastic beast film series (Fantastic Beasts and where to find them, Fantastic beasts the crimes of Grindelwald and Fantastic Beasts the secrets of Dumbledore) and where it went wrong. Taking a deeper review of JK Rowling's writing by comparing her to George Lucas and how he succeeded (and failed) with Star Wars and also how the controversies behind the scenes involving Ezra Miller and Johnny Depp affected the franchise. Also analysing the Harry Potter films and how writer Steve Kloves was a key figure behind that success.
I hope you enjoy the video!
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How would you rank the Wizarding World films?
Goblet of Fire, Half Blood Prince and Crimes of Grindelwald are by far the worst.
GoF is by far one of the best books of the saga, but the movie is too rushed, too many cuts, too many mischaracterizations. Similar thing with HBP, where they put too much focus on teen melodrama over the more interesting subplot on Voldemort's past.
Crimes of Grindelwald had a weird, misplaced pacing, with too many flashbacks or character interactions playing too late into the film, and disregard of established canon (McGonagall was born in 1934, yet she's already an adult teacher, and Dumbledore teaching DADA instead of Transfiguration). And lastly, too much exposition on things that needed to addressed, such as Credence surviving.
1/ Order of the Phoenix
2/ Prisoner of Azkhaban
3/ Deathly Hallows part 1
4/ Deathly Hallows Part 2
5/ Chamber of Secrets
6/ Philosopher's Stone
7/ Fantastic Beasts
8/ Half Blood Prince
9/ Goblet of Fire
10/ Secrets of Dumbledore
11/ Crimes of Grindelwald
1) Deathly Hallows part 2
2) Philosopher’s stone
3) Deathly Hallows part 1
4) Goblet of fire
5) Chamber of secrets
6) Prisoner of Azkaban
7) Order of the Phoenix
8) Half-blood Prince
9) Fantastic Beasts
10) Secrets of Dumbledore
11) Crimes of Grindelwald
1. Prisioner of Azkaban
2. Philosopher's Stone
3. Chamber of Secrets
4. Deathly Hollows Pt. 2
5. Deathly Hollows Pt. 1
6. Order of the Phoenix
7. Goblet of Fire
8. Half-Blood Prince
And then all of the Fantastic Beasts movies.
Number 3. Order of the Phoenix
Number 2. Prisoner of Azkaban
And...
Number 1: Wingardium Leviosa by Oney Cartoon
What we *wanted* was "The Adventures of Wizard Steve Irwin", what we *got* was "The Rise of OG Wizard Hitler"
Love this
I thought it was decent. The first one was good too.
Bravo, Max!👏 That is vivid and succinct! I was so looking forward to "The Adventures of Wizard Steve Irwin" (who seems to be on the high end of the autism spectrum, which makes him quieter than Steve, but just as endearing!). 🥰 I didn't want to see "The Backstory of DRAMAdore."
Steve Irwin as a harry potter wizard is now living rent free in my head, thanks.
Absolutely
Maybe this franchise would have been successful if it had actually stayed being about the fantastic beasts and Newt’s journey, not a Dumbledore and Grindelwald soap opera that had no business being in this story.
I think it absolutely could've been a fantastic older drama series if they just commited to the bit and made it about Dumby and Co. instead of trying to appeal to the largest audience possible and messing up tone. Harry Potter fans are older, and yes they might have kids now but JK tried to make the fantastic beasts movie Sorcerer's Stone and Deathly Hallows Pt 2 at the same time.
Newt should have been working on his book, going to find these creatures but unwillingly making them targets for Grindlewalds plans.
Each movie, new beasts and characters.
I agree. The _Fantastic Beasts_ saga failed because it was an spin-off that they forced into becoming a prequel. Graves (Collin Farrell's character) shouldn't had been Grindewald in disguise but a Grindewald follower. Newt Scamander's adventures shouldn't had involved Dumbledore directly, maybe make the last film about the final confrontation between him and Grindewald, but in all the previous ones the should be in the background, the sidelines, while Newt and Jacob and Tina and the rest goes arround twarting the magical-beast-related schemes of Grindewald's asociates and leautenants. This would also give room for a more propper Dumbledore film saga, maybe announce after the second _Magical Beasts_ movie that next there will be two Wizarding World films the same year: the third movie and a Dumbledore origin story starring Jude Law (who appeared in a *small* part in the second film)
@@Mario_Angel_Medina yeah, films 1 and 2 should have only mentioned Dumbledore and Grindlewald. Bit we see effects of Grindlwald on the countries they visit, throughout.
In the 3rd, both wizards arrive to rescue their teans but won't fight each other. They make it clear this will happen in next film.
Exactly, they should have did the movies as one offs like rogue one, maybe a few individual character movies, a movie about the founders of hogwarts or a series of films, a movie or 2 about the origins of dumbledoor. And an origin of the dark Lord, filling in those parts of voldemorts life that the movies missed from the books. Heck I should be in charge of hp at wb
Fantastic Beasts should have been a Bond/Indiana Jones -esque movie series where he travels around the world visiting various ecologies and saving animals from poachers, going on adventures in dense jungles or arid desserts.
One could argue that's what it tried, but ultimately failed, to do. Grindelwald and his followers were pretty much wizard Nazis.
@@clanpsi and yet they made Grindelwald's big evil plan to get people on his side was stopping WWII
Arid desserts... like apple pie?
For a series called "fantastic beast". There's not much beast in the movies....
that sounds like Pokemon. see why they didn't head in that direction?
Fantastic beasts had so much potential. I have no idea why she made grindlewald and dumbledore a part of it instead of making another spinoff series separate from fantastic beasts. It’s not like we don’t have enough content, in fact we barely see many beasts except for the first fantastic beasts. Newt has literal been everywhere, it’s the perfect time to develop other parts of the wizarding world like Uganda with their chantless magic and Japan etc all with their own unique beasts.
She had to pander to the community.
Forget about fantastic beasts ,start supporting Wednesday (it could be a great banger for mystery- magic lovers)
@@winchesterkid what community? The one that wants to see Grindelwald and Dumbledore fanfic?? 🤣🤣🤣
I was so sad watching the second movie because there were rumors about it introducing the south american wizarding world, but that was droped for Dumbledore and Grindelwald poorly planned backstory...
@@funspot9520 Personally, I did not enjoy Wednesday. It just really feels like the script writers don’t know what they are doing. The whole Tyler being a manipulator monster just ruined the whole show tbh. Wednesday and Tyler's little romance was kinda sweet because he had similar issues to hers (like wanting to run away, his family not getting him, not having friends,…) so he liked her and she, who despises all romancey things, couldn’t understand it so she kept pushing away… until she figured she didn’t want to and came to him. But that was the moment where she learns none of it was real so she just casually proceeds to torture him. So, instead of a subplot about how she opens up to the world and learns that not everything black and white we get Wednesday being right about romance being shit and how trusting others can be a mistake and she just gets more reasons to be edgy for five seasons.
Also, the whole wolfing out thing was also done poorly. They showed us Enid learning self acceptance while everyone she trusts don’t believe in her, but instead of keeping the subplot about Enid never wolfing out but accepting it they did make her wolf out, showing that being different is fine as long as you turn out normal in the end. I don’t know, it was such a weird decision to throw away the subplot like that
as soon as newt and the beasts took a backseat in the second movie I started to lose interest because they're what I loved about the first movie, newt's view on the world and his love for these creatures, not some wizarding world war story
Completely agree. What I liked about Fantastic Beasts was not only the sense of wonder from seeing a wizard version of New York and all the magical creatures, but also the new core characters introduced in this series - Newt, Jacob, Tina, and Goldie. What disappoints me most about the series being discontinued is that we won't see the rest of *their* story....and more marvelous creatures. Agree with others who posted that the Dumbledore/Grindlewald story would have made more sense spun off into a completely separate series.
I'd like either, but definitely not both
In my opinion the other story line the dramatic one with grindlewald was always awkwardly impleneted... after having to switch actors and completely change the tone for the second movie they should have conceded and done a trilogy with newt starring centrally. After that, they could do another movie or series following Dumbledore and Grindle specifically
I totally Agree, the first film was ok, was enjoyable enough and expanded the world we knew, and it should have been left to that. We didn't care about Grindalwald as mush she thought we did, and now its too late.
top marks - that is literally the REASON
The fact that Newt was a side character in his own franchise from the second movie onwards 💀
Honestly I fucking hated him as main character. He was a straight incompetent idiot. It's like having the cloudy with a chance of meatballs as main character for a story where its world is supposed to be taken seriously. Harry Potter was a gifted, humble and intelligent main character. REASONABLE. This guy as main character was awful to me from just the first minutes of the movie
Basically The Hobbit trilogy.
Well ... who needs Newt?
@@TheScytheMoron I also found it kinda random that he was the one, out of ALL the wizards and witches in the HP universe, whom they gave his own franchise. But they did and then made him a side character? This makes no sense at all!
@@TheScytheMoron They desperately tried to make a shy non traditional male hero, but nobody wants to watch a shy mumbling "hero".
Johnny Depp didn’t resigned, he was ASKED TO RESIGN. Whilst that gr00mer Ezra Miller still kept his role.
Five films. After seeing the second movie, I honestly wondered how they could squeeze five out this. Going into the third film, I had forgotten enough about the first two that I had trouble following the plot. And the kids in the theater were totally lost.
Yeah, the howls in crowd when JK announced 5 films was weird. Like, let’s wait and see if these movies are any good first before we start celebrating. Also the amount of movies was a massive red flag. Like how are they gonna make 5 whole movies without it being a bloated, over indulgent mess?
JK Rowling doesn't seem to understand the appeal of her own series, which is a slice of life escapist fantasy with some mystery elements of clues leading to a climax. It is NOT an end of the world plot heavy affair. Even in the later darker tone of the series it was largely about the characters interacting and learning about each other while they were in hiding and getting information slowly drip fed to them.
She gets that but at the end thatcwas what she always thought thevplot would be at that time.
You dont have to like it but she Stuck to it and still does.
Yeah, also I find that high-stakes plots are generally a lot more enjoyable if you give the audience a fair bit of time to just be with the protagonists in their day-to-day life. The movies got too serious too quickly. And also got REALLY convoluted.
@@thuranz2773 What for me distinguishes the first films from the prequels is that more than once I found one halfway through on TV and I had no idea what was happening.
jk rowling done messing up like she thinks its a mystery box masterpiece like attack on titan 💀
@@line4169 AoT went to shit too 😂
I think the cannery in the cold mine that JK Rowling had lost her touch was with the Harry Potter play. Although the play was written by someone else, she outlined the story and rather than a fun adventure with Harry's kids, we got an overly dramatic family melodrama with convoluted timelines and Voldemort's illegitimate child. Truly the plot points of a bad fanfic.
I thought I was the only now who felt this way, like I was going crazy or something!
I don't think she even outlined the story for that. It was credited to her, the director and the writer, who had a separate script credit. At most she came up with 1/3 of the story.
And considering having her name there was necessary for marketing purposes, that really is a "at most". I suspect it was actually a lot less because:
1/ The story breaks many of the rules of the world and previous stories she created,
2/ at least some of her contributions were just lifted from other places: old characters, returning to old plotlines, the last chapter of book 7 is basically used verbatim, and "new characters" are just taken from pottermore family trees ("look, it's stuff she's written, and she didn't even need to turn up to a single meeting!") and
3/ the play gets the films and books confused: Ron being comic relief, the third task involving moving hedges, people flying without broomsticks, non-verbal magic.
So I suspect her involvement was basically just "Well I always thought it might be difficult being Harry's son at Hogwarts. Maybe he'd become friends with a Malfoy as a kind of rebellion" and then they just took that and grafted onto it as much fan service as possible, whether it was from the books, films or pottermore.
Erm, it's "canary in the coal mine". But, yes.
When I read “cannery in a cold mine” I pictured a catfood factory :p
@@creatrixZBD I spent an embarrassing amount of time, trying to figure out what a cannery had to do with coal mines - before I realized the error. xD
They just had to make Fantastic Beast an HBO series and it would have been great. Each episode is a new animal Newt is trying to tame or learn from. Really could have been a success.
Rowling's writing style would've far better suited a television show too.
So pokemon with wizards? XD
@@bryana.escaleralopez lmao
@@bryana.escaleralopezThat’s pretty much what it should have been, yes.
Good point.
I could never write a novel or a short story, but I have many story concepts and scenarios in my head. I am relieved to know that just because I am terrible at writing prose, it doesn't mean I'm ultimately doomed to fail at storytelling. This is such an eye-opener!
The biggest problem is the she's not a screenwriter, writing a novel is very different from a screenplay. Newt is an interesting character and Eddie Redmayne is so dorky and charming, he can carry the film. I'd have loved a series of Newt finding new beasts and their stories. I hated the Grindelwald as Hitler storyline.
Her novels weren't really meant for this big, expansive world. They left a lot to thte imagination and that's fine, but they didn't really support the existence of an outside world (biggest example being 'nobody outside the UK cares about Voldemort') She pushed outside the boundaries for the first time when making those other wizarding schools, and they... were absolutely terrible.
@@Saga_Anserumin the end, it’s a modern children’s book. It’s not the next Tolkien book, it’s heavily based on its characters and has very streamlined story. It doesn’t have a huge expansive world that all makes sense but that honestly doesn’t really matter. People forget that
@@humanbean4037 I'm aware of this, but it seems like she herself has forgotten. I was fine with it being a small and contained book but she tried to push too far.
@@Saga_Anserum true. She royally messed with it
I don’t consider anything she does now as canon lol
YES omg i love eddie's newt so much they can make short videos of him with creatures and i would gobble them all
It seems like JK Rowling couldn't make her mind up on which story she wanted to tell, on the one hand you have a cute story with Newt to do with Fantastic Beasts and on the other hand you have the Dumbledore/Grindelwald drama. Neither story supports the other and you end up with a clash of tones and plots. Great video, really love your stuff!
I think it's in Shaun's 'Harry Potter' video that he talks about how JKR has a habit of writing a plotline then realising she doesn't know what to do with it after using it once, so she just badly writes it out in a later book. He even ends the video pleading for JK to stop making the movies because she just isn't a good enough writer to explain why the wizards didn't stop the Holocaust. I have got to be honest and say I do morbidly want to know what bat shit reasoning she was going to use.
@@barrie5224 the fuck is some guy with a rope and a magic stick gonna do against a fully automatic hk416 shooting 5.56x45mm hollow points going 947 m/s?
@@barrie5224 J K Rowling gives the go-ahead and keeps the veto but bad writing - preposterous!
@@DustyyBoi F4¨K LOL
@@barrie5224 That's an easy one. The Nazies had wizzareds so there was a wizard war going on as well. I think that could be an interesting tale.
Newt is a character with lots of potential, sadly it was wasted in Fantastic Beast 2 and 3 and he felt like a side character more than a main character
What are you talking about? He's in the movies a lot. Dumbledore has way less screentime than newt.
What's interesting is that this was the opposite for the Game of Thrones TV show series. In that, they had the original author of the books George RR Martin working side by side with writers David Benioff and DB Weisse. This worked very well for the first few seasons where the writers expertly adapted Martin's convoluted style of storytelling into a compelling story. The initial sucess of Game of Thrones can really be attributed to D & D.
But as the show started deviating from the source material, and as that same source material started running out, they started to write worse and worse scripts. The earlier seasons were about slowly unravelling the story. The later seasons were about moving the story fast to come to a quick and unsatisfying ending. All the while, the original writer of the source material was included less and less.
LoL, do you know one of the reasons for this was that they were one of the choices to direct Star Wars? Which fell appart btw
I have never watched Game of Thrones, and I have a question. I somehow ended up reading the fan controversy about Ros somewhere online, so I got into her character and arc in the series, as well as what characters she was based on in the books.
Meanwhile though, I thought "Damn this is just horrible... all the prostitution, murder, and torture..." like, it's one thing to write or read it in the books, but how the hell did people manage to watch this shit on screen? Kinda makes me happy it flopped, so I don't have to bring myself to watch it lol.
In that case, George RR Martin was /also/ an experienced screenwriter - having written screenplays even before he wrote Game of Thrones.
@@rainymornings well I can't say much for the show since I dropped it when they started to make changes from the source material but the books are basically a criticism of the horrors of war and systemic misogyny hidden as a fantasy story. We ARE supposed to feel horrified by what were reading
GRR is a different brand of writer. His stories r far more complex than that of both Rowling and Lucas, and I say this as a fan of all three series. Very few authors can write on the level of complexity as
GRR. D&D could simplify a complex plot to suit tv, but they sure as hell couldn't write new stuff without guidance on such a multifaceted story.
Many authors feel bulletproof as they get popular. They decide they don't need editors and such. She's like others before her.
This seems even more true when you look at reviews for her latest book, which sounds like an editor needed to cut at least in half, to say nothing of the problematic premise.
@@dylancolon5871 Is that the book that had the transphobic trans character? (speaking of which, JK couldn't make her brand look any worse the more she doubles down on her transphobe-ness)
@@delusion5867 All I know about this book is that it's about the m*rder (idk how UA-cam is about this kinda words) of a totally innocent and pure woman who makes animation for kids who is suddenly and totally unjustifiably harassed by the violent mobs of trans and disabled people (because even though she says that her own experience has nothing to do with this book, every online bully has disabilities in their bio along with the dreaded pronouns, leading to the interesting narrative choice of having all the bad guys disabled) and is like, 20% fake badly formated tweets. Actually those tweets make the thing entirely unreadable on Kindle iirc, the formating totally breaks. A sign that this book has been thoroughly worked on by an editor and not just thrown out of the printing press half baked
@@gaspardp7314 sounds like JK's delving into some self-insert fanfiction with some exaggerations for flair! I remember when she clearly showed Voldemort as a bad guy because he wanted to eradicate a group of people, seems like she want to as well!
I've felt that since Goblet of Fire. You could cut out half of it, lose a lot of the irrelevant side plots like SPEW, and not really lose anything. The movies cut a lot of fluff out
I loved the first movie because of Newt, it felt so refreshing but now he’s taken a backseat in his own story
Fk newt, its about fantastic beasts, not newt
of course, he was a white man.. not a gay man.. lol..
@@maguslascivious4980 he looked very gay at least
@@maguslascivious4980 Many perceived him as gay.
@@etodemerzel2627 of course they did. It's all anyone does these days, is project their own identities on crap... Dude was totally gay though.
I love how in that Star Wars clip Luke is confidently assessing imperial defenses, meanwhile he had never been more than 20 miles from his backwater moisture farm until yesterday.
I... didn't even know the Secrets of Dumbledore had come out as an actual movie until this vid
Honestly impressed that Hamill could remember a line from his audition well enough for a post-release interview.
He was probably forced to say it SO many times. I can see Hamil begging Lucas, "This line is ridiculous. You have to take it out man. People are going to laugh at us."
I love that it seems to be seared into his mind. Badness of that magnitude makes an impression.
Not his audition-sounds like he was WELL into filming, learned the lines, and probably acted it out for Lucas or even had some takes before Lucas gave it up.
My fav Mark Hamill quote is one I'd like to hear less: "Air alert. Proceed to the shelter. Don't be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness."
When you do drama classes and actually star a play, it's so incredible how you can remember some old dialogue, I stared a play in 2016 and I still remember my biggest line
I think the biggest issue with the prequels was that (after the first one) they didn’t know what they wanted to be. While, yes, darker themes are enjoyable, after the first movie being about literally… fantastic beasts, this doesn’t suit. It feels like we were thrust into the plot and like Newt wasn’t even a main character; he was just there for the sake of it. Accidentally stumbling along. If JKR wanted to write about the fight between gridnewald and dumbledore then she should’ve started with that. Newt has no business in these movies and frankly all the ‘fantastic beasts look!’ moments feel forced. They only seem to be there because that’s the main name of the franchise
100%, it felt like fantastic beasts would’ve been a cute and fun standalone film but having newt as the main character for dumbledore and Grindelwalds story really hurt the films tonally and narratively. Thank you for the comment!
If the movies focused on Newt and his travels exploring and researching magical animals and maybe solving a mystery or having a romance. It could have been an awesome 2 hour movie that could have spawned a bunch of lighthearted and whimsical sequels of Newts globetrotting shennanigans.
I enjoyed Newts character and his friends, they would have been a cool magical Scobby gang. Turning the story into magical WWII and the hunt for wizard Hitler was a bad move.
Yes!!! It's trying to be two things that don't work together. Dumbledore's prequel story with Grindelwald and also the adventures of Newt Scamander and forcing these two things together did not work.
Dumbledore isnt a character that can be a Main character.Newt is the Protagonist type character.
If you make albus the Main character he looses the Mystic aura
@@indedgames4359 Newt doesn't care about the Grindelwald drama. All he wants to do is be left alone studying these magical creatures. Keeping him as the protagonist and moving into the Wizard War plot was set to fail.
If the final objective was the the war between Grindelwald and Dumbledore, they just should've made the whole series about them. In HP the story does go from light-hearted to gritty, but HP is a 11 year old in the first movie and a 17yo in the last, so it works tonally. You can't do the same with a 30yo, let alone if the story doesn't in fact revolve around him.
Very true. I wanted to see and hear more about Fantastic Beasts and Newt and Tina. JK Rowling could have probably been able to produce a second series about Dumbledore and Grindelwald but the way it came out was very confusing and choppy.
Extremely kind take on Rowling's world-building abilities
"J.K. Rowling is first and foremost, a storyteller. One who has an incredible ability at crafting believable, layered and vastly expansive worlds" is almost better fiction than JKR ever wrote. It's famous for having one of the worst worldbuilding in modern fantasy and it's the epitome of making shit up as you go along with no forethought about how it relates to the rest of your world. Truly a baffling take for anyone who analyses media.
@@memotherapy5452 thank you
@@memotherapy5452 why do people like you write this type of stuff. are you under the impression that if you desperately try to push this narrative all 500 million people who read this series, the best selling in history, will be persuaded to change their minds. just say you dont like her
@@ftftyffghfvghfcht6701 Mass consumption has got nothing to do with the quality of the product. Otherwise McDonald's franchises would have been gourmet restaurants.
@@ybediz but anyone could make a point that idiotic. everyone in this comments section knows the difference between mcdonalds and harry potter. why not just say you dont like her, people would respect your ilk more
I was only a teenager when the first Fantastic Beasts movie came out and the whole premise really appealed to me as a kid who liked animals, worldbuilding, and Harry Potter. I wish the series had just been about magical beasts, there is so much potential there! All JK had to do was say X magical creature is causing havoc in the muggle world and Newt is the only one who can stop it/save it. Or literally anything having to do with magical creatures. Instead, the series is about completely unrelated things. I remember being excited because since CGI technology was coming along the audience would be able to see 'real' imaginative magical creatures, I was so disappointed in the end. I only saw the Crimes of Grindelwald because I had a friend group at the time but everyone left the theater dissatisfied.
EXACTLY. Give us Newt and animals. Throw out everything else!
@@peskycritter79 SMH my head, Newts are animals.
Hard agree though! I love fantasy animals and stuff like that in general so it's a huge shame that instead of something like a mix of creature design showoffs and interesting plots we get Deathly Hallows with a newt running around
The first Fantastic Beasts is what finally got me into Harry Potter, for the same reasons as you. I love animals, I love cool worlds, I liked the movie, let me finally give the rest of this franchise a shot. It's a shame what happened to it, Newt and his animal pals were interesting enough on their own, Dumbledore and Grindelwald needed to be separate from that.
That sounds like the Lilo and stitch TV series. Maybe this would have worked as a TV series, but as a big block buster, I don't think that idea would work
This is why I still want to play the new ps5 game. I want to explore her world at my own pace, in my own way. I really hope her downward spiral doesn't ruin this game for the fans
One thing that I FEEL you forgot to mention (you probably already knew this) was that George Lucas was actually willing to ADMIT his mistake, he later openly expressed his problems with the films and actively said they were NOT GOOD.
The sequel trilogy made the prequels look like Shakespeare
Apparently even the first 3 SW movies were under constant threat of being affected by what the Rifftrax guys call "Lucas Stupid", and those movies were narrowly saved by a handful of people (like Hamill) telling Lucas: "Don't do that, it's stupid". The problem with the 2nd trilogy isn't that he didn't hire someone else to direct it, the problem was that no one dared to stand up to him anymore after the success of the 1st trilogy. The directors he approached for the job might have refused for that reason as well.
@Nina B. Visually, I think the sequel trilogy nailed it; the look and feel was pretty close to the original movies. But yeah, the writing... SMH
I saw an interview where he said his two big regrets are 1. Not getting anyone to help with the dialogue, while also not encouraging the actors to give their views in the moment, and 2. Pushing the majority of the plot from the 1st film to the 2nd, then pushing it again into the 3rd, only to realise he needed to write Obi-Wan and Anakin's friendship, Anakin's draw to the dark side, the effect of the Clone Wars and the collapse of the Republic into 1 film.
Good luck getting JK to admit anything similar with her own films
Lucas has never said anything of the sort, and is proud of all six of his movies. Fucking trolls.
Too much bullshit in this reply chain to debunk every one of these claims, but suffice it to say that they are all either false, or framed in very misleading ways.
@@kaasmeester5903 Yep. The Prequels were bad because Lucas had control.
The Original trilogy had a lot of input both on the team and from other writers. Thats why it was good.
There is a general tendency to put success down to the actions of single individuals. This is basically never the case.
The problem of believing you were the main reason why a project was successful, yet totally overlooking all the other people involved that did a great job and ignoring the truth that the project was a success because of the combined effort of all people involved, the effort of that your work was only a part of.
exactly. if there is one thing we can learn here is that adaptation is a team effort, and thinking your work is perfect the way it is without having a team to help better refine it for the big screen will only lead to a prequel trilogy level type result.
My main issue with 'Fantastic Beasts and where to find them' was that it had pretty much nothing to do with Fantastic Beasts or where to find them.
the only reason the animals were there was so Eddie could be where the plot was happening.
I honestly don't really know why it's even named 'Fantastic Beasts', while it clearly focuses on Dumbledore and Grindelwald. And to be fair - I think Dumbledore and Grindelwald's relationship is very interesting, at least from the bits we've got in the books, and it's definitely something that could be transferred into a proper, interesting story. But... come on, either Fantastic Beasts, either 'Dumbledore & Grindelwald'.
Exactly, why not both separately?
I couldn't care less about Newt, the beasts or his friends, but I was excited to know more about the lore of Grindelwald and Dumbledore and the war. Similarly I see people saying the opposite, that they loved Newt's plot and not Grindelwald's.
Clearly, mixing them into one big mess was too ambitious. Hopefully they'll make some big budget tv series exploring more of the lore, since Warner Bros might not want to make more movies for now.
@@ehmzed Yeah, initially I thought Fantastic Beasts would be about Newt... and some beasts?
To me Dumbleroe's backstory is more interesting, his love for Grindelwald, being betrayed and everything that's lead to him becoming this secretive old, wise, wizard we all know and love. I'd love to see that. But... that doesn't scream 'Fantastic Beasts' to me.
Obviously the best course of action would have been to do two separate trilogies, with an epilogue cliff hanger at the end of both.
For a last crossover style finale, cue the *avengers theme* .
Yesss! And the gay relationship wasn't even explored, either be authentic and explore it, or just don't casually mention it at all! 🥴
They couldn't choose between the two and ended up ruining both storylines.
The real tragedy is that the first movie was genuinely good
Luckily, it's better than "Norm of the North", which came out the same year of 2016.
No it wasn't!! -_-
@@liampatrick3110 I respect your opinion.
@@liampatrick3110 for you
I'm so dissapointed. Newt Scamander is the coolest Hufflepuff, he is OP magical beast tamer, and all. He is very powerful wizard, but he is pacifist. However, you'll be f'ed once you make him angry.
As Hufflepuff he is a natural born herbologist. Herbology is well known as Hufflepuff's thing, and Newt indeed very talented dealing with magical plants which is also main ingridients for magical potion and poison.
I mean, it's time for Hufflepuff to shine, but they always did Hufflepuff dirty. They kill The Fantastic Beast series just like they killed Cedric Diggory.
I think the best thing about Fantastic Beasts first movie was that it was about Newt, a Hufflepuff and by nature, an outcast.
He showed empathy to these beasts because he saw them as creatures with their own fear and their own needs.
The character Newt in the first movie was just so... loveable.
But Grindelwald is not. I loved Johnny Depp as Grindelwald in the first one. But I also liked how these two weren't destined to fight or stuff. Newt just got involved because he wanted his beasts safe.
But from the second movie, the tone changed.
The movie became more about Grindelwald's cult-leader like manipulation and dark dark politics where Newt is involved because of Dumbledore.
Newt's character would make sense to get involved in the war because Grindelwald wants to use beasts as his army or something and Newt is against that. Not because he's a pawn of Dumbledore or what.
Harry was a child. And Snape was a man filled with grief and rage over the murder of a beloved. It makes sense Dumbledore could manipulate them.
But Newt? An outcast likd Newt who is already used to people being mean and cruel? A grown ass man being manipulated into a fucking war? That doesn't make sense.
Specially because Newt's specific sense of morality seems like 'i will hurt you if you hurt my friends and beast friends'
it died the moment she let fan fiction writers write the sequel material and allowed them to base that off of the movies and not the books
Now I'm thinking...... Maybe she should have made the Fantastic Beasts as a new book series, a medium she was really used with, and THEN adapted again on a movie series, just like Harry Potter. She even would got more money because now the franchise would have more products to sell....
You are right on the money. 💷💷💷💷Pun intended.
That was my thinking... it's somewhat strange for a bestselling author to suddenly switch tracks into the movie biz. The first movie at least made sense because that title HAD been a book, but I was surprised to learn she wanted to create an entirely new franchise not based on anything she'd written.
Exactly. The book series n would have been interesring, then a real screenwriter could have been hired. I've binged the Potter films (and read the books) enough to know that the movies could never have included all the minutiae in the books and the screenwriters did an admirable job of distilling the stories down to capture the essence of each book as well as possible.
She's become too greedy
@@sad_doggo2504 Warner was pushing for more content, that's what started this whole mess. However, I think we can safely assume fame and fortune got the best of Rowling and she believed she could not fail. The Cursed Child was the first evidence of both. A poorly constructed story that wasn't well received by many many fans was, nevertheless, incredibly popular and sold-out for years in advance. Rowling clearly thought she could do no wrong and went along with a movie franchise with no experience in screenwriting or time to plan a proper story. If she had cared more about her universe she would've written a book series first, then let Warner adapt it. But they wanted something fast and she was delusional enough to believe she could deliver.
I thought the worst part of the third film is that it basically tied up everything for no reason and cancelled all the built up dramatic tension in ways that showed they knew they weren't going to make another one.
Jacob and Queenie's dramatic split? Nope, they're married now.
The blood pact? Easy-peasy to break it.
Dumbledore and Grindelwald's legendary duel? We'll do it here, several years early.
Credence's mysterious origin? Uhm.... He's Aberforth's kid, I guess. Don't worry about his mom because he's dying soon anyways.
Newt's patronus? Actually, even though it was said by Rowling that this would be a big spoiler, we're never going to answer it because who cares, we just lost interest and half-assed this film to get it all done, anyways.
And for all that you can thank Kloves and WB. Didn't know Rowling was planning to show us Newt's patronus. Very sad indeed it was cut out. But it only shows a level on which she was pressed to redo her initial script. Which, I'm sure, lacked all the things you've mentioned.
@@Maria_Bar Honestly, I don't think Rowling is without blame herself. Had she been more true to the basis of her art, we would have seen this saga as books first.
@@AustynSN I can agree. Although the first two screenplays were released as books. The third one did not follow the pattern, had different cover, added production details. And it shows.
@@Maria_Bar I remember seeing the screenplay for the third one. And is much better than the film
The funny thing is, Grindelwald didn’t even die and Dumbledore still doesn’t have the Elder Wand, which is pretty important for the series
I LOVED the orginal movie cuz of how Newt and the rest of the characters matched and I was so excited to see how’d they’d continue it all but then it just turned into “fantastic Dumbledoor and where to find him” ugh
lmao ''fantastic dumbledore and where to find him"'
What killed it for me was when they switched actors like no one would notice. I was freaking confused. Then took the focus off Newt.
Imagine series where Newt's main goal world be to find a specific mythological creature that he's sure exists. And to find it he will cross to America, Asia, Russia, Africa in each movie - where he will have a separate adventures (related to creatures, customs, culture, they can even add some dark stuff to it, it's ok!) and we will have a glimpse of foreign magic, maybe schools and actual mythic creatures from cultures all over the world!
Give him couple of companions that can be recurring or only appear in one movie, let him explore the world, meet famous Wizards and Witches, learn stuff himself.
I'd like to see THAT and not Dumbledore, same old west and Very Big Problem To Resolve.
Or FB being a serial/show/series (whatwver it's called in english), each episode focoused on each beast. Like, Newt had a enitre Zoo of Beasts, so I don't think a serial/show/series would be short, and would be a nice, small brick to WW world bulding
That idea sounds like a magical version of the Indiana Jones movies (which is not a criticism, I liked those), which took inspiration from film serials. And something like film serials would be a great format for a project that actually IS focused on the "Fantastic Beasts"... but alas. Gotta cram Grindelwald in there, I guess.
Going in, that's what I thought the series would be - each movie Newt explores a different geographic area, showcasing the magical culture of other countries besides Britain, while looking for magical creatures.
@@StarryEyed0590 I did too and was disappointed when it wasnt
Oh she would fuck that up so bad...
An interesting comparison. I saw Crimes of Grindelwald around the same time as The Last Jedi and I felt that they both had exactly the same problem: they set up some interesting characters in the first movie (an animal lover who can't save a troubled teen, a mind-reading wizard who falls in love with a muggle baker, a nonviolent storm-trooper who befriends a junk trader with a mysterious past). Then in the sequel these characters are pushed aside in favor of a bunch of new characters, and the things that were important to them become secondary. (What beasts? What bakery? What lost parents?) They also undercut their own goals - the troubled teen is not dead, the memory wipe is easily undone. If nothing that happens has lasting consequences, why care about any of it?
Honestly, the first of each trilogy were good as just standalone films but the sequels tried to piggyback off of an already complete and well-rounded story. (Although, I haven't seen TFA in a while so I might be a bit off)
@@delusion5867 I mean, yeah, you're off. TFA has some good ideas, but it set up the sequel trilogy to fail in large part because of JJ's obsession with mystery boxes coupled with the fact that he's a lazy hack who can't write good stories. Re-watch TFA and you'll realize that, while it's fun, it's just a pale imitation of ANH; it sets up too many ideas that can't possibly have good answers, like:
what happened to the Empire?
where'd the First Order come from?
what happened to the New Republic?
what happened to Luke?
how did Ben turn evil?
etc
I mean, I know the whole "the EU nailed it" conversation may be tedious... BUT the EU nailed it, and it's insane to me that Disney decided to take no lessons from the EU (not to mention that they decided to scrap it rather than build upon it). The EU crafted new and interesting villains who vied for power, but the villains were still the Empire, there just wasn't one single figure head anymore. Part of what made it interesting was that there were several people trying to take charge, and they had to figure out a way to work together so as not to weaken the Empire further. There were new characters introduced into the New Republic too... like, seriously, all you had to do was make a spy movie with Winter at the center; make an Ocean's 11-style caper with Han and Lando and Chewie (and Dash? and a handful of original characters that you could later spin off); make a movie where Mara Jade, back when she was the Emperor's Hand, is tasked with taking over a criminal organization and bringing them under the Emperor's control without them knowing they were working for the Empire. Go way back and tell a really cool, fun story exploring the Old Republic. Infinite possibilities and they decided to tell an infinitely worse sequel story (than Zahn's Thrawn/Hand of Thrawn duology series(es)), to tell a much worse and lazier and basic version of Han's origin... just pathetic.
@@SchulzEricT TFA is barely passable as a decent movie, mainly because it was an imitation of ANH, but it still brought and utilised some good ideas to the table that went wasted or unused in the sequels. For example, a character being a former stormtrooper, kylo ren wasn't bad either and stood out from vader, the characters had decent chemistry, and the differences it had from ANH were decent.
-Un- fortunately, I can't say the same for TLJ and TRS, both of which did nothing, went nowhere and were mere cash grabs with no vision or creative endeavour. The changing of directors didn't help and while TFA is ok on its own, there was clearly no plan for a trilogy as they made shit up, and retconned what the previous movie did as they went along.
The way disney treated the EU is terrible. Years and year of great comics, books, games and creative ventures into the Starwars universe were wasted all to fit Disney's vision.
Actual insane comparison. Also there were only like 3 new characters in TLJ (Rose, DJ and Holdo) and both had barely any screentime, also the entire film is about characters suffering from those consequences to the point where some the main ones (Snoke, Luke, Holdo, Phasma) die and most of the resistance gets destroyed. Pure madness. Cosmonaut Variety Hour has infinitely better takes on both of these WILDLY different films.
@@delusion5867 lol TFA was in no way complete and if anything was critisized for relying too heavily on unplanned mystery boxes, you call the director of the best ever TV episode from the best ever TV show a cash grabber because you are incredibly ignorant, Kylo Ren was splled out as a Vader wannabe in TFA and if anything it was TLJ that made him more than that and George didn't consider the EU to be canon either ("it's a different world from my world") delusion is right - it's actually impressive how consistently wrong you are.
Man, I can't believe TLJ retconned the following: "Luke walked away from everything", "I'm just here to get Rey" *cut to Poe impulsively trying to shoot Kylo Ren in front of his entire army* and "the ones you're waiting for in Jakku, they're never coming back" - oh wait, those were set ups for character arcs that the sequel did in fact follow up on. Come on...
With all the plot holes in HP it's no wonder JK can't write a movie
And they mixed two movie series into one. Either make this a TV series or two movie series. One about Dumbledore and one about Newt. They can overlap in some points but not like this
I have a lot of loyalty to George Lucas (for obvious reasons) so I feel the need to defend him. But to be clear, I don't at all think you were attacking him, I'm just anticipating the criticisms people often levy at the prequels and his "mismanagement" of them.
Many people often say Lucas was surrounded by yes-men when making the prequels and I'm glad you clarified that he sought other directors and script writers to help with the prequels as he did during the OT. But I think many scriptwriters and directors (who were his personal friends) thought the OT proved Lucas's skill and were confident that he could do the job himself. I don't like Lucas wanted to go it alone but rather he was trust into that responsibility.
And I'm also glad you mentioned how ambitious his prequels were. The pure scale and scope of the prequels were unlike anything that had been seen prior and many of the directors were rightfully intimidated. But Lucas took that burden upon himself and even if you weren't completely satisfied with the final product, it should at least be respected that Lucas was in uncharted territory and accomplished with the prequels what no other film had done before.
No other film had ever employed so much CGI, no other film fully captured all out sci-fi war on the ground. The insane amount of costumes, make-up, and special effects used in the prequels set the ground work for the CGI visual effects used in nearly every blockbuster today. The CGI armies and massive battles we see in super hero movies like the MCU and in sci-fis like Avatar all owe their scale and cgi to Lucas and what he did in the prequels.
And at the very least, while his dialogue might be clunky and unrefined, course, rough, and even irritating, it always had heart. There is a very earnest and moral story at the center of the prequels that comes through even if the dialogue isn't immaculate. Lucas has this amazing gift of making his stories feel both internal and immensely external. His characters are so personal but the world they live in are so sweeping. He, more than any other storyteller I think, understand both world and the characters as separate agents. He can paint a picture of this immense, physical, political, and historical galaxy while never missing our on the individuals who inhabit that galaxy and make it function. He knows both how the world impacts the character and how the characters impact the world. It's why his films feels so real and historical even when they take place in space with aliens and robots.
That is just my take on George Lucas and why he will always have my respect. I think it's a respect even more deserving in the aftermath of the sequel trilogy because those movies really illuminated the magic Lucas brought to Star Wars and how lost Star Wars feels without him. Lucas had a beautiful and breathtaking vision in the story he told with Star Wars and while he alone may not have been able to achieve it, he sought help with he needed it and bared the responsibility when that help didn't come. And even if you are of the opinion that his prequels were flawed, the visuals, scale, scope and world building he achieved with them were still groundbreaking and are the basis for the blockbuster movies that dominate theaters today.
100%. Writing a screenplay is completely different than writing a book. Backstory is communicated with visuals and delivery, not exposition. Exposition is reserved only for critical plot points.
When I saw in the credits of Crimes of Grindelwald that JK rowling wrote the movie. It pretty much explains the boring exposition, horid pacing & too much characters with little relevance. A professional screewriter can fix all of those things by simply removing unnecessary scenes for a 2- hour runtime movie
god, i hate exposition so much. you aren't even supposed to do it too much in books in the first place. ugh. exposition is the bane of my existence. SHOW, DON'T TELL!
@@CK-lt6jl i think showing is ok for like when you make a world to know where you are.
Like..
instead of "Theres some trees" you just say "In Arizona"
Don't forget the bad editing with it. Both are intertwined. They can make or break the movie
And anime... Exposition is for anime 😂
Two words: Credence Barebone. This whole side storyline is a clear example of a novel writer not grasping that in a screenplay you just don't have time to do these kinds of subplots the way that you can in a novel series. Harry Potter had to advantage of fans already knowing the characters very well due to having read all about them in the seven novels. Fantastic Beasts introduced these new characters out of nowhere, so that fans were not already attached to them, and there were too many of them. She needed to streamline the notable characters down to a smaller number.
I think that where these movies went wrong ultimately comes down to greed, rushing them and working with Yates. It's so hard for me to understand the lack of vision (from WB's part more than JKR's to be honest) for both Newt and Dumbledore/Grindelwald. How did they not think that these characters had potential for their own projects? fans of the wizarding world would've waited years for both to come out as long as they were well executed and thought out. Instead we have a mess of two amazing and intriguing plots and there's no going back to fix it :/
Absolutely great job, particularly in drawing the parallels between Rowling and Lucas. I've been saying the exact same thing for years now (about Lucas specifically, I stopped thinking about ROwling a long time ago).
i think the fact that JK Rowling hasn't written anything good in at least a decade a half contributed somewhat.
I forgot how old Harry Potter was....
She wrote the Strike series, they are pretty good.
Really? What about the crime series featuring detective Strike and Robin Ellacot? It's rather decent (the books I mean) True, "fantastic beasts and where to find them" did not live up to the title, but that is one thing... she is a good author, she can tell a story.
Unpopular Opinion: Goblet of Fire was the last book that I liked. The later books got too serious. I prefer my qizard stories to be fun and whimsical.
Focus on character development and relationships. This is the beating heart of Hollywood. Anything that fails at this fails at everything. No amount of CGI or expensive sets or cool explosions or universe ending consequences can save a story or franchise that forgets that relationships and character are the whole point.
This, big reasons everyone was talking about movies like Banshees of Inisherin & EEAAO last year, they got that shit right.
Try telling that to basically every movie studio and writer in hollywood right now, the only things that matter is pushing your political opinion and an agenda. Modern Hollywood and movies suck.
This is a really good point. Also the major reason why the last two seasons of Game of Thrones are that bad
This reads to me like a very very sarcastic comment. Because if there's one thing Hollywood has completely forgotten for decades, it's character development.
David Rosen Disney and WB are not listening (MCU, DCU disasters).
they could have made a separate movie about Dumbledore and no one would have complained
Villain should have always been Colin Ferrel’s character. Such a good actor.
I think from a purely aesthetic point of view the HP movies were far better because they didn't take place in a grey and dirty version of New York but in the magical and beautiful environment of Hogwarts.
And even that environment started looking dirty and depressing after a while, as if literally being visually darker with each successive movie is how you express that the story is getting darker with each entry. I remember how even the lighthearted scenes in the 6th one especially looked distracting from how they were nonetheless lit and colour graded to look like it was shot during a wildfire haze.
To be fair, the HP films became a bit stale and got too dark (in the very literal sense) around film 6 as well. I could hardly see a bloody thing in Half-blood Prince. Why not allow some colour, for heaven's sake? The greyish tint/hue around everything was infuriating after a while. Film 1 + 2 will always be the most visually pleasing to me, even though most of the CGI aged quite badly.
@@D0MiN0ChAn I think it was a trend at the time with films. At least Prisoner of Azkaban made sense to be a bit dim since it marked a turning point in the series and you could still see everything and there was some saturation.
@@D0MiN0ChAn David Yates didn't have a good vision for the series--at least not enough to justify him directing 7 films for it. His dreary, desaturated look sort of fits the tone of the later HP books, but it felt completely out of place even in the first Fantastic Beasts fim.
@@moviemaestro800 No one points ever at David Yates but almost everyone says that The Prisoner of Azkaban directed by two time Oscar winner Alfonso Cuaron is the best Potter film.
Then why not point at the director as responsible for the worst movies of this franchise??
Also, the great decision Lucas made in the OT of Star Wars was precisely not keeping the same people around him for the three films.
David Yates has made 4 Potter films and 3 Fantastic Beasts. That's too much time for someone to be around the author of the world and that leads to confidence and closeness between them which makes it quite hard for him to consider telling her what's wrong.
We tend to think respect is what stops the crew from criticizing but other times it's precisely the closeness.
Idk if I would credit Rowling with "being great at creating worlds" when the whole hp world breaks apart if you try to think about it on a scope greater than the Scottish highlands
I think where it went in Crimes of Grindelwald proves your point - she was so stumped by applying her world to the time period of WWII that she accidentally put her heroes on the side of the Axis powers
It’s actually wild how much credit we all have given her, when her worlds are so flimsy. They fail so easily under a critical lens.
She's great at coming up with ideas, not so great at thinking through the consequences (how would this actually work, if it was real?) or being consistent, keeping track of her own rules
Right?? How are wizards a secret when there are only like 10 “pureblood” families? Literally everyone else had Muggle family members
But world is very fun though. It doesn't necessarily need to be logical. We don't read HP for realism.
This is why books and films will always be two different arts. People who always complain a movie isn't exactly like the book don't seem to understand that for most books you cannot do a direct translation to film!!
Nearly every Harry Potter book had the same teacher villain. Every Hogwarts year, a new Dark Arts teacher happens to be evil or connected to Harry in some way. Quirrell, Gilderoy, Mad-eye (Bartemius disguised), Dolores. All of these people tried to kill or harm Harry even though they were chosen to teach there by the headmaster or the ministry. Seems like they put Harry in harms way on purpose and he was much worse off going to Hogwarts than staying home.
The only thing I took from the third movie was that I now really want to see a movie about Mads Mikkelsen and Jude Law playing messy exes that is actually good or at least remotely enjoyable... Because this one just wasn't.
I feel like all of Rowling's work after finishing the initial series can be summarized by the phrase "kill your darlings". She keeps putting too many ideas together without considering if they should actually be in the story or not.
Expanding the Wizarding World sounded like a great idea. The execution just didn't hold up.
And this is supposed to tie in to The Dumbledore-Grindlewald Duel.
Gotta love that you could only talk about Harry Potter for a couple of minutes before getting bored and switching to Star Wars
It doesn't help that the 2nd Fantastic Beasts film had so many inconsistencies that hard core fans were super confusing. Like Dumbledore teaching DADA instead of transfiguration and McGonagall being there. She wasn't even supposed to be born yet. The third one was a litte better. I know a few super fans who could have made it spectacular compared to what it ended up being, but at least it felt like an ending, even if it wasn't the ending that J.K. Rowling wanted. Maybe she shouldn't have pissed off the fans.
I have another reason, i only heard about secrets of dumbledore 2 months ago. I didn't even know it had been released
Should've stuck with 1 Fantastic Beasts movie and then a seperate trilogy about Dumbledore and Grindewald with easter eggs to HP and FB. Newt is litteraly the most unneeded main character in that rivalry between two others.
I heard Johnny's first version of Grindelwald got rejected as he played the character too charming and we, as the audience, would be too persuaded to side with him. It's like they didn't even fully commit to it being a wizard world Hitler story either.
tbh, the character is trying to stop the world war 2. it's not like he's completely wrong either.
@@nelgluhak6709 I must have missed that part or it's been so long that I forgot. Didn't watch that last movie so that doesn't help either.
@@calahara in crimes of Grindelwald, when Grindelwald hits his bong and shows his followers visions, he's basically like "yeah, if we don't take over and start controlling muggles, this is what will happen". And the visions show world war 2, nuclear bombs being dropped on Japan, and people boarding trains (Jews being sent to death camps). So like... I struggle to see him as a bad guy. He is right about muggles at the time lol
@@nelgluhak6709 Ah, I remember now, yeah, that preventing the second world war bit is a good reason to influence the Muggle world, just the controlling part is concerning. Wouldn't want Muggle slavery.
@@calahara any dictator take a cover well done for those living in fear... even german one got that very well... germany are suffering from world war 1, suffering from leak of money and politic instability, soo he found one group to blame, found support and start domination, the marketing are amazing, under the hood he was taking out rich judys to get all valuable and using industry to build a army, we know where it comes... Did you know how cuba started? URSS? China? Always is a good intention cover over a freedom takers, this is why i stand for any law makers, the only own that should be limited are the state itself
Series lost me when it went from a “let’s tell another story set in the wizarding world but in America” to a “oh this is now just a Harry Potter prequel” I was very excited during the initial announcement when they released all that information on different magical cultures in the Americas and from my memory NONE of them actually make it into the movie. I think there was a Thunderbird on the first film, but that might have been the only native reference.
It's for the best. JK isn't good at dealing with indigenous culture
@@genericname2747 or indeed any race other than "white englishmen".
To be honest, if the British had an Empire, then British magical expertise had to be vastly superior to other cultures.
I can't imagine other wizard cultures sitting idly by when their regions are being changed and colonized by British muggles.
@@matiasluukkanen7718 careful now. It sounds like you’re putting some thought into a story that is dangerously close to having depth and complexity.
"Like who talk like that George" should be a line that every screenwriter should have in mind. Does the dialogue make sense and if not, how to include what you want them to say in a viable way
While I actually love the whole fantastic beasts movies I think it could have been so much better. The story of newt would have been good for a 2-3 movie collection about the world of the fantastic beasts. And the story about Grindelwald and Dumbledore is amazing too. Could also have been easily 3 movies on its own. How Grindelwald and Dumbledore met, how Grindelwald became this evil wannabe-hitler and the fight between them. It had so much more potential
I had the fantastic beasts 'book' as a kid (and by book, I mean a cute little guide with pictures for all these awesome creatures as if you were reading an actual wizard textbook in the HP universe) so hearing about it becoming a film, I was pretty surprised. I assumed it would be like the Indiana Jones/Sherlock Holmes kinda films where Newt travels the world, meets all sorts of wizarding cultures in Africa, Asia, America etc. and discovers a bunch of monsters causing havoc in their little areas, trying to piece together what kind of animal he was dealing with and how to solve the local crisis. And probs get some backstory on Newt himself too. Seeing that it was already trying to hedge in some dark political stuff in the first film... yeah, not my cup of tea. Which sucks bc Eddie seems like the PERFECT Newt and would have done so well in a miniseries instead.
I really like your idea. That makes me think that Fantastic Beasts should've been a mini series with episodes instead of movies where that can be explored and the history of Newt and the world that surrounded him and how that affected the beasts he discovered.
Newt Scamander is the most OP mythical beast tamer I've known from The Wizarding World and Harry Potter lore.
At this point, I just gave up to Hollywood. Newt would get much more character development and better storyline if he is an anime character.
Broo I have the SAME book, from so many years ago.
CUTE LITTLE GUIDE?! You mean the absolute Horrorshow that was that fucking south american blanket thing, that slid under your door just to lay itself on top of you while you were sleeping and slowly suck the life out of you?!!?!? I am scarred for LIFE! :D
I never seen the fantasticle beastles, neven even finished the Howard Potter films and books myself, but your idea for a movie in that universe.. That I can get behind. Shame they thought of something else.
I think JK needed to pick the story she wanted to tell. I have no doubt Warner Bros will fund as many HP ventures as she wants to write; she doesn’t haven’t to funnel them into one premise.
I think she should have
A) had a Newt + fantastic beasts movie series; new beast loose in a new city every movie. Aim it at the PG13 audience to bring in new generations of kids. Love it. Money prints itself.
B) gone into the world of limited series with a darker, more adult Dumbledore V Grindelwald pseudo nazi story. If the second beasts movie had the Newt removed, and then been split into 8 episodes of tv; I think it could have worked. You would have the time to introduce that amount of characters, build factions, learn their histories (like the world building of Game of Thrones). Doing all that and a Newt story in one movie was a stupid idea.
Tv is not what is was 10 years ago. And a game of thrones style epic within the HP world is my idea of an literary orgasm.
I don’t know why JK is still producing movies like it’s 1999. Maybe her whole mindset is stuck there? Did she go back there are destroy her timeturner? Would explain a few things.
To be fair, her political attitude and sense of humour both seem pretty stuck in the late 90s, as well.
@@moviemaestro800 yes, that’s what I was alluding to 👍
She seems to have trouble with *time* in this series.⌛ The faculty of Hogwarts was a mess of fractured timelines. Dumbledore was too young and muggle-like.🧙♂ Minerva McGonagall shouldn't be there at ALL, being as yet unborn!🙀
Or make it a book then have it turned into a movie
I am really hoping a time tuner went awry because it absolutely would explain many things.
I think JK was really good at making a fleshed out vertical slice of the wizarding world, but when she tried fleshing out the other parts of the world, she just took what she knew and spray painted it red, white and blue. So it feels wrong, like, that's not how the wizarding world would develop in New York.
The reason why I boycotted Secrets of Dumbledore was because of how Warner Brothers treated Johnny Depp. Nothing again Mads Mickelson, he is a hell of an actor. WB sacks Johnny Depp over an accusation but let Ezra stay when the crap pulled was way worse. Grooming a child and assault!? Really. Its the same with Disney if they release a pirates movie with out Johnny I will not watch it.
The problems with writers writing screenplays is that they only know how to use words. So they tend to do all the storytelling in dialogue instead of also using ambiance, scenery and sound. Hell, sometimes even a split second of sudden silence and darkness can say more than any character could spouting exposition.
A good author can use words to describe ambiance, scenery and sounds to tell their story. do you think books are just people spouting exposition nonstop?
@@azora52 Thank you for completely missing the point my friend.
@@CaliHime well what is your point? To me it just seems like you're saying all writers know is dialogue, which isn't the case
@@azora52 using words to describe ambience in a movie is bad, you have vision you can show instead of tell, thats why people watch movies to see instead of read
@@azora52 What i said was writing screenplays. There is a difference to books. With books, as per your example, words is all you have as a tool for storytelling. As such, good writers know how to use words to describe things vividly. Your imagination does the rest.
When it comes to movies or series, a story can be told by dialogue, music, backdrop, noise, and so forth. So using just words, ergo characters telling stuff, is a very one dimensional way of conveying a story.
Don't get me wrong, exposition can work very well, if done correctly and not overdone. With more recent movies and series dialogue has become more and more used as a way of storytelling, in favor of other means. Mostly to the detriment to the story being told.
That is what I mean.
I feel this is unfair to Lucas. The ideas present in the prequels are more interesting than anything we see in FBAWTFT
Oh absolutely, i don’t disagree
@@Essential_Cinema It's not just the ideas. The actual movies are miles better and know what they want to be. They are as strong as they are because they build off of each other and were meticulously planned. If anything, the FB films are more like the sequels. (I'm not saying they are, but it's frankly closer)
I feel that apply to the sequel Star wars films also. The prequels has their problems but I can definitely say they make me care about the characters and the events happening. I couldn't give two shits about anything or anyone in the sequal trilogy. It's like they got no souls
Oh please no, not more of there letter soups... It's bad enough already
@KC You made my day
Plot twist, as Gilderoy Lockhart
She stole the Harry Potter story, later presented it as her own
And when she tried to do something original by herself, she created "Fantastic Beasts"
Same I doubt it
The problem with the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movies is that they weren't about fantastic beasts or where to find them.
I love all these ways people would rather have wanted the newt story told. But I just wanted to mention. If they REALLY wanted Dumbledore and Grindelwald in there. You have the perfect reason to do it, her name is Arianna and making her an obscurus. Literally if they made the movies about the mysteries of obscuri, you could have a second movie like. Dumbledore hears how newt handled himself in America and dealt with an obscurus, still not over the trauma of his sister he contacts newt to look into them. And while newt is digging through them you can give some Dumbledore Grindelwald backstory.
And the best part? Wizarding WW2 can still happen! But make it a background thing. Don't make it the plot itself, but instead look at how the war is affecting wizards. Maybe causing some of them to suppress themselves in fear and ultimately creating an obscurus outbreak of sorts.
Very quick thought up idea but I think it'd have a lot more going for it than whatever the fuck they did with the last 2
Brilliant!!
This is a great concept! I really liked the first Fantastic Beatles film and I loved the cast. Always thought Colin Farrell should have been in the Harry Potter films. I didn't think it made any sense for Newt's journey to continue into a Dumbledore story but what you've proposed would make so much more sense
Not a bad idea, but I would not want JK to write a gay romance.
@@corneliahanimann2173 To be honest this is the one that felt most out of place, I was so confused when I watched the second movie at first like, "Wait so is Dumbledore and Grindelwald brothers by oaths or lovers??"
If it's only brothers then sure, it can make sense..Ish?
But it felt too dense for lovers, not deep enough, because we don't know about their relationship too much other than they are "potrayed" as "inseparable pair" which later connected by the blood pact 😭
@@aerialfishuu yea I have not touched that franchise yet.
I think the harry potter books were fun and I try to remember them that way, but I just knoe that Rowling can relate to the experiences of children and put that into words that we relate to, but I hate that she has convinced herself that she has written a series similar to the epic of writers like GRRM and Tolkkien. She understands school, not politics. The fact that she can't relate to minorities and people in general, with a different lived experience, was charming for an innocent child, but isn't all that cute when it's still present in an adult.
GRRM is an example for s writer that can somehow write relateable women, and that is rate, but even he says that he doesn't have much representation for people of colour in his books, because he has not lived that life, he thinks he is an old white man that lived in the 60's and is not the right person to write these stories, and these people do, it'd just that his books are popular, but that times are changing eventually we will get that representation. I really wish Rowling was that humble, that she recognized rhat she probably can't relate to having a loving relationship in a society that rejects you and feels entitled to hurt you, for loving another person and living with guilt for so many years or even rejecting and denying your own nature like it is a crime. She shojld have stuck to children's books.
Writing a book and writing a screenplay are two different trades. A 2 two hour film has to be streamlined and simpler compared to a 12 hour book.
I would have loved if we had a fantastic beasts trilogy based on different protagonists.
1. Newt Scamander
2. Hagrid
3. Charlie Weasely
first time i’ve seen one of your videos and wow, you crushed it, can’t wait to see some other ones
My problem with the second and third movie was that they didn't really feel like movies. They felt like long episodes in a series. Every Harry Potter movie had a clear ending (well except deadly hallows part 1, but speaks for itself) and Fantastic Beasts also had a clear ending. The story was wrapped up, arcs closed or got a temporary ending and it fitted. The second movie got a cliffhanger ending, and that just doesn't work for a movie in the wizarding world.
So well said!!
Looking back, halfblood prince and order of the phoenix, DH 1 and 2 all suffer from the same problem. David Yates is a bad director, and the storytelling just isn’t there. Just glueing scenes after another doesn’t make a story. You need to get someone invested in the characters and events first. Otherwise it’s just a collage of pictures. So fucking boring. I stopped and wondered the entire time: what is happening? And why?
Luckily the HP series were well established before David started directing, so we had some idea what the story was about.
Yeah, because they were adaptation of books. The crimes of Grindelwald are not
bad luck, 100 viewers, 200 opinions.
Also the movies have like 1000 characters and none of them really do anything
Dumbledore/Grindelwald and fantastic beasts should have been 2 separate stories
One thing that always nettled me was the bilge trying to say that Grindlewald started the war ultimately to stop the Holocaust. Because I goddamn remember Rowling in the books *_HEAVILY_* implying that Grindlewald either worked as a mutual partner with Evil Uncle 'Dolphie and the Thule Society (those were an occultist group who worked with the Nazis), or had Imperius'd him to be a puppet for the Muggle side of Grindlewald's atrocities.
Evil Uncle Dolphie, really?
"it [only] grossed $400,000,000." that statement is wild lol
Fantastic video. As a huge Harry Potter fan, I have fully gone through the stages of grief with the extended Wizarding World and the post book problems of the author. Now, I truly find joy in watching people pull apart the awful decisions of these prequels. I could talk for hours about the bizarre choices in Crimes of Grindelwald. You did a fantastic job making this video! Thank you!
This so much. But also just Joanne herself. Her entire series was about bigotry and wizard Hitler. I knew something was up when Hermione becomes Minister of Magic- but DOESN'T free the house elves? It felt like more than just plot hole. In her own life tho she became the same person. Instead of fighting bigotry Joanne has joined forces with other bigots and super conservative groups that activity hurt all minorities. It's like Hermione hiring Dolores Umbridge back- it's beyond a bad idea- it's sabotodge.
@@lorianabanana6066 Not wanting men to be put in the same prisons as women is bigotry. Lol. You people are truly clowns.
I remember as a child being so frustrated with how the books handled Hermione’s activism for the house elves. Like, everyone is just fine with literal slaves and the one character who isn’t is mocked? Wtf? And then Hermione ends up the minister of magic and more or less upholds the status quo, Harry becomes a fucking wizard cop and upholds the status quo.
JKR doesn’t want to write about bigotry in any more depth than “killing people is bad mmkay”.
There is often an over consequential syndrome that crops up in sequels. Movie 1 does well so a sequel is planned. Suddenly everything is the most important and consequential thing to ever happen. Remember that janitor from the first movie? Turns out he is a dragon born bastard heir to the throne, that children's book on the cupboard? It is actually a portal to the end of the world. The funny laugh of the old mentor? That laugh comes from his battle with the demonic laughing lizard in the prequals. All the exhibition and easter egg cramming gets in the way of developing characters people can enjoy living the story through.
Janitor was the most useless thing in the film
I cant tel if those ate real examples or if you just made them up 😂 (i haven’t watched any of the movies after harry potter)
@@ChristinaMagma I watched them but I cannot for the life of me remember these examples. It shows how little of an impression it made on me, who was always very into the easter eggs and references in the Harry Potter books and films.
Few things ruin a story faster than a poorly planned/nonexistent road map before their release. Those things happen because without a properly planned story, there is no foreshadowing or setup for a sequel so the writers have to retroactively find and create fake foreshadowing
Is the janitor's name Jon Snow by any chance?
This is such a good analysis. Great job!
I had vaguely heard of the second Fantastic beasts film coming out but I had never even heard of the third one until now
I absolutely hated her need to alter the lore and add to it. Dumbledore‘s backstory was dark and heavy enough as it was, we didn‘t need that weird Credence-is-secretly-a-Dumbledore story. And of COURSE it had always been planned that Nagini was actually a human! Stuff like that made me so angry because I had just wanted a fun addition to the world of Harry Potter, not a rewrite of finished characters' backstories.
Credence was so utterly unnecessary. Doesn't help that the actor is all moody and annoying. Nothing likeable at all, unlike villains like Bellatrix, Lucius or even Grindlewald. Both actors for Grindlewald were amazing but even they couldn't save the movies. I hated it so much whenever Credence appeared. Ugh.
OK, that's not how that works. Let's see you write better.
@@thevarietyoflife7283 No need to be a writer to judge the quality of the writing.
Credence was the worst part of the whole series. Well, that and Warner Bros. dumping Johnny Depp.
@@thevarietyoflife7283 Ironic that you say "that's not how that works" and yet you follow it with "Let's see you write better." That's not how critiquing works.
The difference, to me, is that I find a lot of the charm of Lucas' Star Warses *is* the wooden dialogue. It makes it seem less real, more melodramatic, and for the story being told, I think it works. Certainly stuff like "I don't like sand" is a bewildering thing for someone to say in real life, but you can't deny it's a memorable line. Also, in the prequels, while there's a lot of dialogue concerning politicking or philosophy, it still usually ties in to character motivation and moving the plot forward. For Crimes of Grindelwald, so much of the exposition drops just felt like JKR trying so hard to be clever, with M Night Shyamalan style "twists" - like did we really need for the Dumbledore babies to be switched on the Titanic as it was sinking? Did we really need a 10 minute screeching halt to the movie while Lestrange reveals all of this in excruciating detail? And where the prequels had a couple issues of racial coding (man is Watto a Jewish stereotype), at least those are aliens that you can kind of handwave - CoG had a single Asian character, and it was revealed she would eventually turn into Voldemort's evil snake because she was born with a curse or something. Like for serious what the fuck.
They are space soap operas. Anyone that has watched a soap opera knows that dialogue is not their strong suit and that's OK. At least they are entertaining.
I wouldn't even say there's one specific difference. The SIMILARITY, of the hp prequels to the Star Wars prequels, is the fan reaction. And honesty, that's kind of where it ends. The movies themselves couldn't be more different.
@kshamwhizzle I think Christopher Lee and Ewan McGregor did their best with what they were given.
I hear the dialogue was made in attempt to mash together Shakespeare with space operas, on top of the characters themselves being emotionally suppressed space wizards, emotionally suppressed politicians, or children
This is also why Sheev, Grievous, Dooku, and Obi have the best lines in the prequels: Sheev and Grievous going full over-the-top camp, Dooku being a noble played by someone who actually knows how to suppress emotions for intimidation *and* go full Shakespearean, and Obi accidentally memeing himself with lines that were obviously not emotionally suppressed
(Also this is why Watto and Jar Jar are livelier, their characters are not meant to present as emotionally suppressed)
@@Necroxion All in all, I think they did a pretty good job!
One more person who should also be noted as important to the original Star Wars was George's at the time wife, Marcia, who ended up being responsible for a lot of the editing together of the footage that was shot, since apparently the original cuts were not particularly good.
I loved this, amazing analysis and super entertaining :)
I just want a harry potter series that talks about the other classes (hufflepuff, ravenclaw, slytherian, the stuff that wasn't really explored about them,) in hogwarts, other Wizarding schools, and so on.
Wednesday and Addams Family is what I immagine American equivalent of Slytherine would look like.
Hogwarts legacy got you.
I feel like people would have continued to enjoy these movies if they kept the focus on Newt and his fantastic beasts. But J.K. decided to toss that character and the entire beasts concept aside and people didn't care for that.
Yeah no one cares about Dumbledore as much as Newt.
The Moment Dumbledore was cast as the New Protagonist, it's All Memberberry here.
@@conradojavier7547 right? That’s what I thought when they had Obi Wan in the prequels! I’d rather follow Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru!!
@@SchmergDergen Yeah but Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan is one of the most praised things about the prequels (there's a reason about why his name is first on the credits of epsidoes 2 and 3), even more so than Hayden Christensen's Anakin (no offense), that's why people was excited for the new Kenobi show and we know how it ended.
@@jesustovar2549 yeah, poorly because it’s more Disney sludge from the pipeline. Either way, far far more people would rather see Dumbledore than Newt.
This was an incredible well executed video. Thank you for making it!
Very good take. Some amazing people just aren't fit to do certain jobs. That is a fact of life, most people aren't jack of all trades and we need others to complement us.
Most perfect example is the football manager Brian Clough and his assistant manager Peter Taylor. There's a book and a movie about it.
JK Rowling never should have been put in charge of film scripts. Even her consistency in the books left something to be desired, but in novel format it worked.
Also, the title of this film series being 'fantastic beast' is just dumb. After the first film, Newt's inclusion makes no sense. It seems forced into what is essentially Grindelwald and Dumbledore's story.
Agreed , bottom line novel writing and screen writing are different beats. Just because you are good in one is no guarantee you wil be just as good in the other.
Small takeaway, but I loved how you showed footage of Alfonso Cuarón while speaking about the ideal director for the franchise, he was definitely the best.
Hands down the best
He was actually asked to direct the fantastic beasts but he turned it down which saddens me
@@Essential_Cinema I love the first fantastic beast's film but if he had accepted it would have been 10x better. (POA is my favourite film so I might be biased)
If the franchise focused on the actual fantastic beasts and how Newt helps them with the help of the other Wizarding schools, the films might have actually been interesting
My personal problem with the Fantastic Beasts films, is that they took the fantastic beasts out of it.
When reading and watching Harry Potter, I was obsessed with the magical creatures of the franchise. I wanted to see and learn more about them. Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, gave me just that, including a protagonist who is just as crazy about those animals as I am. In the second film, the beasts had to move into the background to make space for Grindelwald. Despite the film being called ,,Fantastic Beasts'', the actual beasts became more of a side gimmick. I am fine with bad writing, as long as they give me enough of the fantastic beasts, the reason I watched those films. With film two specifically, all target groups have been disappointed. Because of that, people didn't go see the third film.
Fantastic Beasts should have been just one film, the first one.
I'm also reminded of The Hobbit, a thin story that the original director felt obliged/forced to stretch it far too far.
TBF I actually did like the Hobbit films, though realistically were very stretched.
Same here! Though I have to admit I enjoy the Hobbit :P way more than this series anyway. I think Jackson really did his best with what he was given, meanwhile I’m not sure I can say the same for Miss Rowling here
Just like with the Star Wars prequels's reputation after the sequels, I think many people would defend The Hobbit after watching The Rings of Power, I enjoyed The Hobbit trilogy too.
This! Everything had to reference LOTR instead of The Hobbit standing on its own. Bloated and overly action-filled.
Peter Jackson only wanted it to be 2 movies but the studio wanted 3 movies so they would make more money
I still can't figure out why they bothered bringing Johnny Depp into the Fantastic Beasts franchise in the first place. Was it really worth it to have Colin Farrell play a character who turns out to be a disguise for another character that looks nothing like him, especially since this was the first time we'd seen either of these characters on-screen (at least, in adulthood; can't remember if Grindelwald appeared in Deathly Hallows or not)?
Yes Grindewald appeared in Deathly Hollows as an old man in Azkaban.
@@jesustovar2549 He also appared as a young man (played by Jamie Campbell Bower)
TBH that blew my mind and I love both actors. I always wanted Colin Farrell in the Harry Potter films. Johnny Depp being recast was unfortunate but Mads Mikkelsen was a better casting choice for Grindelwald
For real, why did the second and third movie basically drop the fantastic beasts? The fact that we went from a fun story about this wizard zoologist trying to get his animals back before a whole secret world gets exposed to whatever that weird wizard Hitler story line was is super baffling.
I can't wait for the next one comes out!